Take my hometown, for instance. Long Beach, NY. The City By The Sea. What wonders might one see if they decided to stroll up and down the 2.2 mile boardwalk on a Saturday morning? Well...
It all started, as many beach excursions do, with our friend, Metal Detector Guy.
This modern day 49er looks to find his fortune by mining through Chipwich wrappers and seagull shit hoping to find the gold plated bracelet that some guy named "Avi" dropped while playing Kadima with his hairy-backed cousin.
Like many boardwalks, the Long Beach boardwalk has a lane dedicated for bicyclists. In this lane, you'll see all sorts of sights, like tandem bikes and bikes dragging little wheeled pup tents filed with kids and seated bikes and hand-pedaled bikes and on and on. Maybe even the occasional unicycle. And, most notably, you will always see one or more guy like this: Unnecessarily Tall Bicycle Guy.
That's right. Nothing screams please notice me any louder than riding a bike with a seat 3 feet higher than normal for no practical reason whatsoever. And just because you like to get high doesn't mean your bike has to be that way too. How do I know he likes to get high? Well, he's riding that bike. Barefoot and shirtless. And has a beard that extends from his neck and not his face. And he has a pale, long-haired friend who rides next to him on a similar bike. And then they pull over and meet their other friends and play hackey sack on the boardwalk. The only way I'd be more sure was if he was hanging out with Snoop Dogg and Ricky Williams while licking a shirt worn by Woody Harrelson.
As I progressed further towards the west end of Long Beach, I noticed a fairly professional sporting area set up on the beach. Was it the AVP beach volleyball tour? Nope, that's in July and August. Was it Budweiser Volleyball Invitational? No, that's still a few weeks away. This was a less familiar yet all-too-common site. This was a group of We Act Like We Think This Sport Will Take Off But We Know It Will Never Go Anywhere Guys.
You see, late last summer, the "Beach Tennis USA" folks started loudly hyping their awesome new sport to the Long Beach crowd. They had the biggest names in their sport (I don't even have a joke for this. The biggest names in Beach Tennis? Really? Just think of something clever and chuckle to yourself) appear and hold a big exhibition match. They played music, gave away prizes, demonstrated the sport and gave individual clinics. And after all that, I could still only think of the words of the immortal Homer J. Simpson.
"They were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked"
The last oddity that caught my eye on Saturday was this:
No matter how hard I thought about it, I could not for the life of me figure out how or why a desktop PC monitor would end up in a public trash can on a beachside boardwalk. Someone had to consciously decide to take a non-functioning monitor with them from their apartment, walk or drive to the Long Beach area, climb up an entrance ramp and cross to the seaward side of the boardwalk to deposit said monitor in the trash. WTF?
Anyway, that's just some of the weirdness you might enjoy spending a day in my hood. Unfortunately, I was unable to discreetly photograph the young woman who thought it was best to jog the boardwalk in a jogging bra and tight silver metallic short shorts. Jogger stripper? Stripper jogger? I'm still trying to do the math on how you can slip a twenty into the pants of someone as they run by.
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